Yoga, meditation may have brief effects on blood pressure, long-term effects unclear: Study

Relaxing techniques, including yoga, meditation and breath control, help bring down one’s blood pressure in short-term. However, the long-term effects are unclear, according to a review of previously published studies.

Researchers from the University of Bristol, UK, said that more rigorously designed and longer duration studies are needed to confirm if relaxing methods can help treat high blood pressure.

Hypertension, a chronic condition, will require long-term treatments and behavioural changes and thus, interventions providing short-term benefits are “unlikely to be clinically useful”, they added.

Experiencing high levels of stress is known to be a risk factor for high blood pressure or hypertension — which can increase one’s chances of heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

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While drugs for treating the condition are available, adherence in taking these drugs is poor, thereby generating interest in alternative approaches such as relaxation techniques to reduce stress, according to the researchers.

Analysing 182 previously published studies, the researchers found that most relaxing mechanisms seemed to lower both systolic and diastolic blood pressure in about three months.

The findings of the study, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) Medicine, suggested that “relaxation and stress management techniques might have beneficial short term effects on blood pressure for people with hypertension, but the effectiveness of these interventions is still uncertain”.

The interventions commonly employed for relaxing analysed in the study included breath control, yoga or tai chi (a Chinese martial art), meditation, biofeedback, muscle relaxation and music.

Breath control was found to bring down systolic blood pressure — the first and higher number in a blood pressure reading — by 6.65 mm Hg and meditation a drop of 7.71 mm Hg.

Meditative movements of tai chi and yoga could achieve a drop of 9.58 mm Hg in systolic blood pressure, while mindfulness and psychotherapy could lower the value by 9.90 mm Hg and 9.83 mm Hg, respectively.

“The results of our systematic review and network meta-analysis indicate that relaxation or stress management techniques might result in meaningful reductions in blood pressure at up to three months of follow-up,” the authors wrote.

“Hypertension is a chronic condition likely to require long term drug treatments or behavioural changes. As such, interventions that are used for a brief period, or provide only short term benefits, are unlikely to be clinically useful,” they wrote.

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